


The shape of memory

by qwerty



Category: Mushishi
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-11-06
Updated: 2010-11-06
Packaged: 2017-10-13 02:13:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 865
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/131689
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/qwerty/pseuds/qwerty
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>From the records of Karibusa Tanyuu on the incident involving the loss of two casks of sake from the Karibusa storehouse</p>
            </blockquote>





	The shape of memory

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Tarnera for the in_particulate Mushishi exchange:  
> 1.) Characters: Ginko (anyone else in the fic/art is up to the person writing/drawing)  
> Prompt: Things forgotten, things remembered.
> 
> 2.) Characters: Ginko and Adashino  
> Prompt: They can act like such kids. What if they actually were?
> 
> 3.) Characters: Tanyuu and Ginko  
> Prompt: A quiet day spent together takes an unexpected turn.

_From the records of Karibusa Tanyuu on the incident involving the loss of two casks of sake from the Karibusa storehouse_

Chapter 2.12  
... I spoke to the mushishi Ginko, who rarely has anything of value to say - "Ah," he interrupted then, "that is unfair. You never want to hear anything useful when I ask; here, I think you have not heard this story yet."

Chapter 2.13  
"You remember my physician friend, the one who collects artefacts pertaining to mushi? We met as children, when I was travelling with the Watari. He was not yet apprenticed to the local physician at the time.

"When I saw him, he had just had his hair cut not a week past. His mother had placed a bowl on his head to ensure the result would be neat, but this measure proved much more efficacious than anyone would have expected: there was a mushi in the bowl when his mother put it on his head." Here Ginko paused to refill our sake cups, but his hand shook and he spilled twice as much sake as he poured into the cups. I took a sip and he refilled again, and spilled yet more sake.

Ginko continued: "The mushi stayed on his head and kept it in such order that it seemed the bowl was still there. Not a hair moved out of place no matter how he tried to disorder it. Yet more of its kind followed it, and though he could see nothing, Adashino-san persisted in complaining of a sensation that he was being trailed by shadows. Loose material such as leaves and dust in his vicinity settled into rounded shapes, and when his mother's hair began to look as it it had been cut around a bowl as well, I decided that action had to be taken."

We both paused to drink, just enough to moisten our lips. Ginko poured again, and this time missed the cups altogether.

"I borrowed a mushi-pin from one of the Watari and took it to Adashino-san," Ginko said, determinedly pouring until he filled our cups again to the brim, though it overflowed slightly. "However, Adashino-san became strangely convinced that I was making an attempt on his life, and I had to chase him twice around the village before I caught hold of him, with his mother's help, and teased out the mushi from his hair with the pin while he yelled and his mother threatened to give him a bath.

"It took far too long, but eventually I removed the mushi from his hair, whereupon it dispersed, unable to survive without the hair to give it shape, and the others attracted by it dissolved of their own accord as well.

"Oddly enough, Adashino-san remembered nothing of the event once the mushi was removed from him, but he continued to entertain a sense that something is missing, which led him first into medicine, then into the study of mushi once he understood his memory loss was due to mushi influence."

As Ginko poured sake again, a paw reached up stealthily from underneath the low table we had set in the open by us for our little afternoon talk, and seized Ginko's cup. I overturned the table, spilling everything, and Ginko pinned the revealed tanuki's shadow. The tanuki squealed, and I supported Ginko's hold on the squirming shadow with my own pins.

"This kind of mushi infests tanuki," Ginko said to me, "and makes them steal sake to drink. The skin of a tanuki thus infected is said to increase the gold it is used to work with to the size of eight tatami mats, no matter how small the amount started with. Of course, that claim has not been borne out in practice, to the best of my knowledge."

I looked at the crying creature and told Ginko, "But we cannot allow it to continue drinking up our stocks of sake..."

Ginko shrugged. "I will pin it inside a hat and find a tanuki-statue outside a restaurant to put the hat on. As long as someone pours some sake on it occasionally, it will bother no one. Perhaps some people will be more inclined to drink when they see it in passing, but thus far the mushishi I have spoken to have no empirical data on this reputed effect."

So the mushishi Ginko pinned the mushi in a hat he had with him and the tanuki ran away unharmed, if a little tipsy. And that was how we came to use up one cask of sake to find out what happened to the original missing cask of sake. As you can see, we really drank very little of the sake; less than half the cask, if my memory serves me right.

* * *

"Did I really write all this, Tama-san?" asked Tanyuu when she could focus well enough through the throbbing of her head to read the damp scroll still reeking of sake Tama-san had thrust before her. Ginko was of course long gone by that time. "I suppose the account of the mushi on the doctor's head was sufficient triumph to bind the shima," she sighed. "Let me sleep a while longer, Tama-san."


End file.
